The Company of Strangers (18 page)

‘We’ll tail him from Lisbon.’

‘I wouldn’t put anybody on the flight,’ said Voss. ‘He’s a very cautious man. Even our own agents won’t make contact until he arrives in Rio.’

‘We’ll check him on and check him off,’ said Sutherland. ‘Can I have a word, Richard?’

The two Englishmen went out on to the colonnade and as they went down some steps and on to a steep lawn out of sight Voss heard their opening exchange:

‘You can’t put this to him now,’ said Sutherland.

‘On the contrary,’ said Rose, ‘I think the timing is perfect.’

Voss pressed the sweat out of his eyebrows with the edge of his thumb. Five minutes and the two men were back. Sutherland was, as usual, grave and Rose’s reliable levity was turned off. They’d gone out English and come back very serious men. Voss felt something turning in his bowels.

‘We’re going to make a communication with Wolters through our usual channels,’ said Sutherland.

‘Your usual channels?’ asked Voss. ‘I’m not sure what that means.’

‘We have a way of letting Wolters know about intelligence we want him to hear.’

‘Real intelligence?’

‘Yes, the real thing.’

‘You mean threats?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And you’re going to tell me first…to see how I react?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Rose. ‘We know how you’ll react. It’s just that we think the information you’ve given us makes you a member of our club.’

‘I don’t like clubs,’ said Voss, suddenly revealing things about himself. ‘I’m not a member of any.’

‘It’s also important that you know that this message to Wolters has nothing to do with the intelligence you’ve just given us.’

‘The communiqué that will be given to Wolters tomorrow will be as follows,’ said Sutherland, his voice so low that the other two had to lean in to him: ‘If we do not have an unconditional surrender from Germany by the 15th August, by the end of that month an atomic device will be dropped on the city of Dresden.’

Voss lost the ability to swallow. It was as if what his mind was refusing to accept was also being rejected by his body. The sweat, which had gathered in his hair and eyebrows from the hot night and the heat of the hurricane
lamp, now broke and flowed over the taut skin of his drawn features, so that he had to wipe his cheeks as if he was crying. He thought of his mother.

‘Are there any other circumstances, apart from unconditional surrender, in which this could be prevented from happening?’

The two men opposite him thought about the meaning of unconditional surrender.

‘Well, I suppose…Hitler’s death might do it…as long as Himmler didn’t take over, or anyone like him,’ said Rose.

‘If we got cast-iron proof that there was no atomic bomb programme, or we had the exact location of any laboratories and the crucial scientists involved in the programme – Heisenberg, Hahn, Weizsäcker – so that they can be destroyed…then possibly the action could be…’ said Sutherland.

‘It would save a great number of lives,’ said Rose.

‘But not many of them in Dresden,’ said Voss.

The two Englishmen stood. Voss felt broken in the middle, his legs not operational. As they left, Rose, not a normally demonstrative man, patted him on the back. Voss sat alone for a quarter of an hour until his motor responses normalized. He picked up the hurricane lamp, went out of the room and handed it to the remaining agent, who stood at the edge of shadow under the Moorish arches of the colonnade.

‘A beautiful evening, sir,’ said the agent, dowsing the lamp.

Voss’s legs didn’t work the pedals very well on the way back. He scared himself taking hairpin bends with one foot flooring the clutch and the other still on the accelerator. The tyres had squealed, the engine howled, and the steering wheel slithered through his wet hands. He found himself thinking of Judy Laverne coming off the same road
and wondered whether this was what had happened. Something terrible had been said to her, some terrible revelation and she’d given up, thrown herself away, exhausted by man’s capacity for inflicting horror.

He took a walk on the beach at Guincho for twenty minutes to stop his legs shaking, to see if the Atlantic rollers could thump out the dark empty space in his chest and guts. But all he’d felt was the ground trembling beneath him and its reverberation through the cast of his body. He’d thought about something Rose had quoted to him in a previous meeting. Something about hollow men. He couldn’t remember it precisely, but Rose’s first words, as they’d met that evening, came back to him.
The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind.
Yes, that was what he’d become. Alone out here, between the earth and the sea. Nobody. He was nobody any more. Modelled. Fabricated. Moulded. Cast. And with no way back to the old Karl Voss. The one that…the one that used to what? Believe in things? Admire people? The Führer? Pah! He was lost. That Rose. He says these words and then: ‘Nothing, Voss, old chap, nothing.’ It
is
nothing. He’s right. Karl Voss is nothing but a hunted man. Hunted by himself.

He’d been drawn back to the car, winched to it. He sat behind the wheel, held his head out of the window, rested his chin on the ledge and smoked, staring at the ground. He drifted deeper into his dark mind, retreated until, panic-struck by his wanderings over that empty landscape, he started the car and headed back to Estoril.

Voss parked up somewhere between the Hotel Parque and the casino. Smoking was all that was holding him together. He lit one cigarette from another. He strode up towards the casino. He wasn’t thinking any more. He was doing. He was desperate. He walked past Jim Wallis in his car without noticing. He went straight into Wilshere’s garden without checking his rear. Wallis had to run to
catch up with him and even then he only just saw Voss’s back disappearing into the bower next to the summerhouse. Wallis slowed, eased back into the hedge, waited.

Tuesday, 18th July 1944, Wilshere’s house, Estoril, near Lisbon.

It was 2.00 a.m. Anne lay on the bed, pinned to it, absorbed by the ceiling, waiting for time to shift. She wasn’t thinking about what she had to do – search the study. She was floating in and out of fantasy and reality, between Judy Laverne and Wilshere, Karl Voss and herself.

Wilshere said he missed Judy Laverne, said he’d fallen. They appeared to be in love according to Voss and others. Now Wilshere was using her to remind himself of Judy Laverne. To torment his wife? To torment himself? He
had
struck the filly. He’d been angry, deranged by the vision of her. He’d wanted to drive her away, to banish her from his thoughts.

Did Karl Voss know what she was? Was he on an operation or did he, in the heart of the paranoid city, see this as one of hers? Would it ever be possible to know what was real? She decided that she wouldn’t see him again or rather that she wasn’t going to put herself in that position. There would be no visit to the bottom of the garden tonight. There was too much that was unknowable. The equation would never simplify. The variables would mount. The additional logic would defeat itself. She didn’t have the tools to prove any part of the solution. In the end the silver thread would stop tugging.

It was time to go to work. She walked the dark corridor, her shoulder brushing the wall. She waited at the gallery above the hall. The wood in the house groaned after a day
spent straining against the heat. Moonlight lay in a blue rhombus across the chequered tiles. She went down the stairs, stepped around the moonlight, past the cases of Mafalda’s silent figurines.
Amor é cego.
She walked the length of the house and unlocked the french windows to the back terrace in case she had to get back in that way after escaping out of the window. She went back to the study, let herself in, closed the door behind her.

She crossed the room, opened the window behind the desk and moved a plant on the window sill three inches to the right. She lifted her nightdress and took a torch from the waistband of her knickers. She sat in Wilshere’s chair and surveyed the night-lit room.

The books in neat, leather-bound collections filled the walls. Two paintings on either side of the door, one of men in Arab dress on camels in a desert scene, the other of a fishing boat dragged up on a mist-filled beach. Ireland, perhaps. One corner was African, with three masks mounted on the wall, the one at the apex maybe three-foot long with inch slits for eyes and mouth, the mask never more than six inches across through its entire length. Hair, a kind of rough hemp, sprouted from the top. The mouth even appeared to have teeth.

She listened again to the settling house and painted the desktop with her torch beam. A blotter, two old newspapers, a pen and ink tray, tidy. She opened the central drawer. One block of clean paper and beside it a single sheet with a four-line stanza accompanied by jottings in the margins, the odd word crossed out and the replacement word connected by a line. The stanza seemed to read:

Crow black in the middle night

Around the marchers come for another fight.

No boots, but claws scratching through the dust,

No armour, but shells blistered with rust.

That was how it stood at the moment, but it looked as if there were more drafts to be done and even then it would find its way to the bin. The wastepaper basket was empty. She drummed her chin with her fingers and shuddered. If that was what Wilshere had teeming through his mind of a night – ghostly, dark, restless, seething with ugly energy – maybe he
was
going mad. She had a memory flash, a story of her mother’s when she’d visited a cave in India – alone but with the sense of not being alone. Above her, covering every inch of the roof of the cave, were hanging, sleeping bats. The sight of the dormant army, their jostling folded wings, had turned her mother and sent her out in a crouched sprint into the sunlight. Was that the inside of Wilshere’s cranium?

She opened all the desk drawers; some were empty, most of little interest. The bottom one was locked. She shifted books in the bookcase, she lifted pictures, she checked the fireplace. To the left of the fireplace in the darkest corner of the room was the cabinet where Wilshere kept his safe with a combination dial lock. She went back to the desk. She listened. Hands moist now. First nerves creeping in. House noises growing into something else in her mind. Footsteps on a stair. Stop breathing. Sweat under her breasts. She stood up. Remembered her training: never leave a warm chair. She opened all the drawers again, checked the roofs and sides. Central drawer, at the back, stuck with something resinous, a key.

It opened the bottom drawer; inside was a single thick book bound in very soft untooled leather, its plain unlined pages covered in the same handwriting as the stanza of poetry. There were dates. A diary, which at a quick glance
she could tell was personal. Day after day with no mention of business. Started 1st January 1944. The initial entries were rarely more than a couple of lines long – observations such as: ‘
4th January. A rare frost. The lawn quite white. The low sun turns it back to green in a matter of moments. Not what you’d call an Irish frost. It would be quite something to have real foot-stamping weather for once.’ ‘23rd January. Heavy storm out at sea. Drove out to Cabo da Roca, walked the coast to Praia Adraga. The rain driven off the ocean, lacerating. Waves clawed at the rocks and shot up the cliff faces. Rollers on the beach like I’ve never seen. Thunderous. Had to run to stay out of their clutches.
’

A man overwhelmed by tedium or positively reflective? Hard to tell. The first entry of more than a few lines came on 3rd February and coincided with Beecham Lazard introducing his new assistant, Judy Laverne. ‘
I’ve never seen such a mouth. So wide and what lips! The bottom one so plump I just wanted to put my finger to it, feel its soft cushion. And bright red lipstick which rings all her cigarette stubs, which I’ve kept.
’ Infatuated from the first moment. Karl Voss shuttled through her brain.

She skimmed the pages. They ride almost every day, in invigorating rain, in sunshine that was never so brilliant, under magnificent turbulent skies. There’s no such thing as bad weather now. They sleep together in the house at Pé da Serra. Wilshere has fallen. He can’t keep the pen off the page. Her blue-black hair, her marble breasts, her hard, pink, shilling-sized nipples, her jet strip, not triangle, of pubic hair. It was embarrassing, it was touching, it was so private it made the sweat trickle down Anne’s ribs. Until the end of April.

‘
25th April. Lazard has lost his head. He spends too much time in Lisbon. He’s reading bizarre things into normal everyday life. That’s what happens if you spend too much time in that city – everybody watching each other – anyone’s bound to look odd
eventually. Why shouldn’t Judy meet another American? She’s American. She wants to talk to her own people. So what if they go for a walk through the Igreja do Carmo. It’s something to do. Were they holding hands? No. I don’t see what he’s getting at…
’

The tirade continued to the bottom of the page, by which time Lazard’s words had wormed their way into his mind and laid their eggs. The parasites proliferated. Doubt scuttled from page to page, a black spider against the white paper, desperate for the dark safety of the book’s spine. The lyricism vanished. Wilshere’s open, flowing italics tightened, his hand cramped on the page. Lazard reported another meeting in
A Brasileira
café with a different American. He has them followed to the Pensão Londres where they stayed for an hour. Jealousy took root, spreading, ravaging like couch grass. Wilshere was in a torment. Lazard haunted the pages, as reliable as any Iago. Then in early May Judy Laverne announced that the PVDE had refused to extend her visa. She was going to have to leave. Wilshere was sick. He wrote things. Terrible things. Things that should never have been written down, in language that shouldn’t be known, couldn’t be known by anybody outside hell. The page was spattered with ink dried to a coppery blood, the paper had been torn up by the blade of the dry, frustrated nib. Anne turned the pages, the empty pages, pages that could have been full and ripe, to the end of the book where, on the inside of the back cover, were six sets of numbers and letters – R12, R6, L4, R8, L13, R1.

This time the creak of the wooden stair was followed by the slap of a leather slipper on the tiled floor of the hall. Anne wiped the diary clean with her sleeve, replaced it in the drawer, shut it, turned the key. Light from the corridor appeared in a line at the foot of the door. She found the resin in the central drawer, restuck the key, straightened
the chair, stepped on to the sill and out of the window, pulled the plant across, shut the window. The door opened. The light came on in the study. She crouched, her back was as cold as cod, her nightdress soaked through. Wilshere drew up his chair, sat down. She ran across the lawn and down the path to the summerhouse.

In the study, Wilshere leaned back in his chair rubbing his fingers. He sniffed the air. Wisteria. He stood and pushed the unfastened window open, rubbed his fingers again. He looked below the window ledge and then up at his shadow reaching out across the empty lawn.

Anne slowed at the bottom of the path. Her heart rattled against her ribs. Her throat was tight, constricted, as if the neckline of the nightdress was strangling her. She pulled up the hem and wiped her face, pushed the torch into her knickers. She looked back up the path, shook herself out and went into the bower. Voss lay on his back on the stone seat, asleep. She started to turn. He sat up, ran his hand down his face.

‘I’d given up on you,’ he said.

Her breasts were still heaving under the cotton.

‘I didn’t think you were going to come,’ said Voss, pinching the sleep out of his eyes.

‘I didn’t intend to,’ she said, moving into the darkest corner behind him.

He swivelled on the seat.

‘You didn’t
intend
to,’ he repeated.

‘No.’

‘You’re scared,’ he said. ‘I can see.’

‘And why shouldn’t I be?’ she said, the blade of her mother’s voice in her own.

‘Of me?’

‘We’re enemies, aren’t we?’

‘Out there,’ he said, and his hand caught the edge of the moonlight.

‘There’s more of out there than there is in here.’

‘True…but what’s in here is ours.’

‘Is it?’ she asked. ‘Do you think that? How am I to know that?’

‘Because we’re talking like this.’

‘We can talk, but I still don’t know if you’re…honourable.’

‘Which is why you didn’t intend to come,’ he said. ‘So why did you?’

‘I ran out of cigarettes.’

He laughed. Her organs went back to their places. Spies in love. Bloody hopeless. Would they ever tell each other anything? He offered a cigarette.

‘You’re probably a spy, Mr Military Attaché,’ she said, taking one. ‘I work for Shell, the oil company. A sensitive economic commodity.’

‘Everybody’s a spy,’ said Voss, searching himself for a lighter.

‘In Lisbon, maybe.’

‘Anywhere,’ he said, lighting their cigarettes. ‘We all have our secrets.’

‘Spies have even more.’

‘It’s just their job and they’re dull secrets.’

‘You seem to know.’

‘It’s wartime and I work in the German Legation; there are secrets all over.’

‘Which is the problem. Where does the job end?’

‘So you think, for instance, that attraction is easy to act,’ he said. ‘Love, too?’

She sucked on the cigarette, her cheeks sinking in sharply, drawing in the smoke to disguise the race around her heart, the fast blood standing the hairs up on her arms, itching around her teeth.

‘It depends,’ she said, flicking her ash, dizzy now from the nicotine rush.

‘I’m listening,’ he said.

‘It depends, say, if the object of your affection is predisposed to that kind of attention.’

‘That sounds like experience.’

‘Not personal.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘I read it in a book.’

‘Is that the sum total of your experience?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with learning from people who write books.’

‘My mother told me that in affairs of the heart no rules apply. No one’s love is the same as anybody else’s. Comparisons don’t work. Even love between two people can’t be relied on to stay the same,’ said Voss.

‘Your
mother
told you that?’

‘I was
her
child. My elder brother was my father’s.’

‘Do you know what she meant?’

‘Probably that loving my father was hard work. She did it, but he never made it easy for her,’ said Voss.

Silence, Anne waiting for him to continue, praying for him to continue. Voss, staring into the ground, prepared himself to tell it for the first time.

‘In the beginning,’ he said, as if this was now legend, ‘my father was an exciting man, an army officer, my mother…a beautiful…well, girl, I suppose. She was sixteen and she thought she’d found true romantic love until one day he told her that there’d been someone else. A girl he’d loved, who’d died. Those few words wrung out all the romance from their so-called “true love”. But what was she to do? Suddenly not love him when she knew she did? They married the next year in 1910. Four years later he went to war and for four years she hardly saw him. He had some leave…enough to create my brother
and then me but when he did come back home in 1918, on the losing side, he was a different man. Damaged. He wasn’t exciting any more. My mother said he was like a house with the windows bricked in. So she had to find a different way of loving him, and she made it work for twenty-odd years…until the next war.

‘My father was a principled man – one of those generals who spoke out against some of the orders given to the army before the Russian campaign – it cost him his job. They retired him, sent him home. Now he was a man who was not only no longer exciting, but bitter, too. Then my brother was killed at Stalingrad and that was the end for my father. He shot himself, because as far as he was concerned he’d lost everything. He didn’t say it, but my mother was not enough. That was how I found out. In a letter he asked me to spread his ashes over the first woman’s grave and my mother, who
still
loved him, made sure that I did it.’